YouDesigns

MS is apparently upset with Goggle. It feels that the always exponentially growing search engine (lately reincarnated into a giant Swiss army knife) is becoming a monopoly through the acquisition of competitors and its own expansion.
I can't decide if this needs a comment or the sheer absurdity of the situation comes through as first class comedy without any further words....

Of course, it is nothing new that Googs would act as the ruler and ultimate judge of just what the web should be. Their rules for inclusion, disguised only very thinly as recommendations to webmasters have steadily progressed into absurdly restrictive and arbitrary laws.

The penalty is obviously exile - and to be outside of Goggle is certainly akin to virtual death. The ultimate absurdity is that if your website is deemed in violation of these rules, the only way back into their database is by admission of guilt.

No, I am not joking. The reinstatement form request that you explain how you broke the rules and what steps you took to remedy it. The Pope would be proud.

There is no way to ask for an explanation even when you may feel your site is fully compliant. But of course, how could it be? The guidelines make it clear: the rules they publish are not *all* the rules. There are more, but they are not about to tell us what they are...

In the middle of all this megalomania, the end user is left behind. As with any other case in which a company, due to enormous demand and overwhelming share of the market, has the customer by the balls (isn't this more or less the idea of the monopoly thing?) the quality of the service is lagging.

The tendency of Goggle to reward the size and popularity of sites above everything else has filled the first page returns of most searches with links to artificially inflated forums and directories that do little for the end user.

Let me lay down an example: It used to be that if you find your PC infected with a virus or other malware, a quick search for the name of the file in question would return a viable cure somewhere in the first ten positions.

Today such search will most likely take you for a tour of half deserted forums where people poses the question "How do I get rid of X?" in messages without follow-ups.

Searching for a hardware driver will take you page after page containing listings of directories containing listings of searches with results containing listings of directories…. Like in a Zenon paradox, we are doomed never to catch up to the web

So MS pointed its gilded finger towards Goggle, and it is funny to think that they are doing this at a time when their own machinery is fully engaged pushing Vista into our collective consciousness and subjecting our desktops to their own flavour of mediocrity.

Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll sue each other into utter poverty...